by John Updike
“Shut up,” Jane told Sukie. “Let Her talk.”
“Our wedding rings,” Alexandra was inspired to say. “She doesn’t think we should still be wearing them. They come between us and Her. Between us and astral reality. Can you get yours off?”
“My God, yes,” Sukie said. “It keeps falling off of its own when I wash my hands and rattling into the bathroom sink. It wants to go down the drain.”
Her own, Alexandra discovered, was the most reluctant to let go; it was embedded in the fat of her finger. But, painfully, she worked it past the first knuckle, its bunched creases blanching under the pressure. The ring had left a white dent in her finger, like a tiny tree being girdled.
“Let’s put them on the altar,” she commanded. “With our left hands, the hands that wore them.”
Three sinister hands reached out, placing the rings so they were tangent, each to the two others—Sukie’s thick band of gold engraved inside Forever by a jeweller in Greenwich; Jane’s thinner ring like a link in the long chain of Nat Tinker’s ancestors; and Alexandra’s own, middle-size and the longest worn, slipped onto her third finger in the bald daylight of a sandstone chapel whose clear glass windows had contained a view of crumpled dry Western mountains. Slipping the ring on her finger, Jim Farlander’s nicotine-stained fingers had trembled, either with bachelor-party hangover or simple nervousness. The ring was hers to wear but the shackle of marriage his to bear. She felt his skittishness in the touch of his hand and recited her concluding vows like a ranch-hand lovingly calming a shying horse. Her eyes warmed at the memory, and perhaps her near-tears were the Goddess’s gifts. “There,” she pronounced aloud. “We are free. Whatever aiguillettes bind our hearts have been untied. Let Your healing power enter into us unobstructed. We are Yours purely.” She addressed the other two worshippers: “My thought was this. We should undo our bad deeds by committing a good deed.”
“Bad, good,” Sukie said scornfully. “The context is what matters. What’s good one day is bad the next. All’s fair in love and war.”
“Oh, don’t,” Jane whimpered. “We’re trying to make me better. We’re fighting Chrisstopher’s evil.”
Sukie was studying her own hand, held out before her. “I like it without the ring. Naked. I do love naked.”
“It’s scary for me, to have mine off,” Alexandra confessed. A wedding ring, she thought, is an aiguillette—it ties us down, but holds us in.
“Lexa, what’s next? Tell us what to do,” Jane begged. She was regressing, her voice pulled backwards into childishness.
Alexandra took the tarot deck and spread the cards on the carpet face-up, in their four archaic suits—Cups, Coins, Wands, and Swords—plus the twenty-two tarots, forming the major arcana. They were gaudy little gateways into an alternative realm. “You pick one,” she instructed Sukie and Jane, “that reminds you of someone needy you know—someone in trouble. Concentrate on it under the cone of power, and when you feel you’ve made the transfer to the astral plane, burn it.”
“Burn it?”
Alexandra held up the folder of paper matches that had been sitting on the altar, the same with which she had lit the aromatic candles that flickeringly dispensed their smoky perfume. “I tried to get cards without too much coating. I’ll go first.” She looked over the scattered array and selected a court card, the Queen of Cups, who in her empty expression could have been Veronica Marino O’Brien, the queenliness borrowed from her mother. Alexandra bowed her head and projected onto the glazed small surface her inner simulacrum, limned in neuronal connections, of the person its image conjured up. To the Goddess she offered the prayer Let her be fruitful. Untie her tubes. Let her claim her heritage, the fecundity of her parents, Gina and dear Joe. Alexandra felt she had been heard, the Goddess bending low out of the stars, her long hair streaming like a comet’s tail. The suppliant held the card by one corner and held a match under the opposite corner and when it reluctantly caught fire let it fall into the brass bowl, where it burned blue with a green rim to the flame, the chemical-coated card curling upon itself, a single rectangular ash shattering in the end like gossamer pottery. She had watched the process of oxidization so intently that her brow and throat and collar area had sympathetically broken into a sweat; the circle she had drawn had become the base of a cone of power like a bison-skin tepee overheated by a cooking fire of mesquite twigs at its center.
“Me next,” Sukie said, “though I’m not a hundred percent into this.” She picked the Page of Coins, a youth with a conceited profile. She showed it to the other two malefactresses and shut her eyes to hurl her wish, her desire, through the flimsy pasteboard to her maimed former lover, Thomas Gorton. Heal, she commanded within herself. Perform the impossible, as You do with each birth, each falling in love. She felt the Goddess within her, the power of sex and generation, a ribbon of DNA tweaked in Africa and snaking forward into a teeming future, cells knitting from microscopic knots into upright men and women intact and beautiful in every ligament and vein. She held the match; the flame sluggishly took; the purple fire widened its way up the card like invading hordes in an animated map of human history, consuming with black blistering the conceited profile. Sukie let the intact ash fall into the brazier, where it writhed and audibly crinkled at the last turn of its own molecular transformation. The fingers of her left hand stung, having held on too long. Looking up from the stinging, she saw that a bluish haze had gathered on the ceiling. She wondered how sensitive the condo’s smoke alarm was, and prayed to the Goddess to suppress it.
“Now you, Jane. Your turn,” Alexandra instructed, in the nurturing voice of the mother witch, Nature’s agent, though she was unsure that Jane had any capacity for good deeds in her. “Take a card.”
Jane’s withered hand reached and seemed to touch the trump card called Diabolo. It showed a skeleton gracefully posing, ankles crossed, with a long bow and arrow the size of a spear. Jane’s hovering hand jerked back, and she emitted a strangled noise that sucked the gaze of the two others to her face; it looked congested and rapt. Beneath the mannish dark eyebrows, her eyes flicked to first one, then the other of her companions. Her expression seemed indignant. Then her eyes rolled back in their sockets. Her open mouth turned black with overflowing blood.
“Baby!” Alexandra cried, suddenly loving her, yearning to undo whatever had gone wrong.
“My God,” Sukie said. The Goddess had evaporated. The moon burning outside the windows leaned its near-full orb toward the unseen sun. Both women in their nakedness struggled to embrace and right the body of the third; Jane had gone limp as a drained wineskin even as she convulsed in spurts of writhing resistance to whatever was possessing her.
“Shit. It hurtss,” the stricken widow whispered. Blood spilled with her words down her chin, while Alexandra leaped up in a lightning-flash of shaky bare flesh to seize the telephone and punch in a number that was not unlisted, 911.
* * *
iii. Guilt Assuaged
THE WOMAN at the other end of the line assured Alexandra that the Emergency Medical Technicians knew just where the Lenox Mansion Seaview Apartments were—“Off the beach road, up there hidden on the left,” the dispatcher stated, dropping into chattiness. Yet an agonizing fifteen minutes passed before the ambulance siren sounded, first in the distance and then enormously close, its cry cut short in a screech of brakes and the crackle of driveway gravel. At first, in those minutes, Sukie chafed Jane’s cooling hands while Alexandra tried, with humiliating incompetence and revulsion, to breathe life into Jane’s wet, slack mouth and to thump action back into her heart. Her maneuvers felt ungainly and panicky and futile, even as she tried to remember, from episodes of idly watched hospital dramas on television years ago, what else she might do to keep Jane from slipping deeper down into the chasm that had abruptly opened beneath them. There was still, it seemed to her, a subterranean stream gurgling in Alexandra’s ear when she pressed it to her friend’s scrawny breast. Jane’s eyes had closed and her body no longer resisted it
s invisible tormentor.
The first high wave of the crisis had washed away the women’s awareness that they were in the condition of Eve, but then as with the couple in the Garden they knew, and were afraid. “They’re on the way?” Sukie asked, her face stretched so smooth by panic that she looked to Alexandra young, a near-girl again. “My God, Lexa, we must get dressed! We must dress Jane! Where did she put her clothes?”
“She showered on her own, they must be in her room.” A great thickness of circumstance clogged Alexandra’s brain; the faster her heart beat, the slower she seemed to move, her knees and hands jutting into view like the camera operator’s in an inept video. She had to push herself to enter Jane’s little windowless room, which already had a crypt’s stillness. Black slacks and a tan jersey, with underwear on top, were primly folded on her narrow single bed. Her shoes, simple severe Boston-style low heels, were tidily toed in under the bed. How innocent and defenseless they suddenly seemed, useless! The other two renters had stuck her back here as if she were a maiden aunt, or a troublesome child, in this room where sunshine entered only through a clouded plastic skylight. By sharp electric illumination Alexandra caught sight of herself in the big mirror on the back of Jane’s door, her arms holding Jane’s clothes, her shoulders and lower body bare. Her mouth shocked her by being smeared with bright red: Jane’s blood, from the moments when she had tried to lend her her breath.
Dressing the unresisting body brought back the unpleasant sensations of dressing a child—the sulky refusal of limbs to bend the right way, the little surges of obstinate dead weight. Sukie, tugging and pushing with her, said, “Remember the girdles they still made us wear in the Fifties? With the snaps for long stockings? Wasn’t that barbaric?”
“Atrocious,” Alexandra agreed. “Your hips got stinking hot.”
“Thank God for pantyhose.”
“Thank the Goddess, I would think.”
“Boy, after this, keep that Goddess away from me.”
As they together tugged up the slacks, Alexandra asked, “Would you have guessed Jane would wear such low-slung underpants? Lace-edged yet.”
“She had that funny little husband to keep interested. It took a lot to arouse him, Jane told me.”
“And me.”
“And, then, it’s so hard to throw underwear away. You think, Oh, it’ll go through the wash once more, what the hell.”
As they lifted Jane up to do the bra and jersey, Alexandra timorously asked, “Does she feel warm enough to you?”
“Well,” Sukie responded, “I don’t notice blood pooling in the fingertips. That’s often a clue, in murder mysteries.”
“Could you reach me the portable shaving mirror from the altar? I’ll hold it in front of her mouth.”
“Oh, please, Lexa. What can we do in any case but what we are doing? Make her presentable.”
“I know, I know. Damn it, I know there’s something else we could be doing, if we were doctors or better witches.”
“If we were better witches this wouldn’t have happened at all,” Sukie said. Fetching the mirror, she hesitated at the entrance to the magic circle, then scrupulously moved the broom, or besom, aside, rather than step over it as if its magic were null. Held to Jane’s mouth, the mirror, meant a few minutes ago to serve as a window into the other world, sent magnified reflections of Jane’s features skidding; Alexandra’s hand shook, but even so the mirror caught bits of mist, of life-breath.
“What do you think it was?” Sukie mused. “She just sort of exploded.”
“She kept blaming electricity,” Alexandra recalled. “There. How does she look?”
The third woman’s body lay stretched on the carpet with a strangely bridal air, having been dressed by others. A corner of her lips tucked in as when she had made a pun she was pleased with. Her hands were crossed on her chest; they looked too large and veiny for so petite a woman.
“Wedding rings,” Alexandra remembered. “Get them.”
As she obeyed, Sukie said, “We better pick up all this stuff before the paramedics get here.”
“Don’t call it ‘stuff.’ Call it ‘tools.’ Or ‘energy channellers.’ ”
“And vacuum up the circle on the carpet.”
“Our magic circle,” Alexandra said, “short-circuited.”
“You sound like Jane. This is all too terrible. I can’t believe it’s happened.” Sukie squatted down, her thighs fattening, her breasts lightly swinging, to put Jane’s wedding ring back on the unfeeling hand.
“The left hand,” Alexandra reminded her.
“Of course, sweetie. The one with the calluses.”
Alexandra’s ring was no less reluctant to squeeze past her second knuckle on the way on than it had been on the way off. “We must get dressed ourselves,” she said.
“I keep forgetting I’m naked. Isn’t that crazy?”
“You look darling.” Alexandra guiltily gazed down at their unconscious partner in sin. She felt a need for some kind of ceremony. “We love you, Jane,” she called, over a widening gulf.
Sukie repeated, “We love you, Jane. Hang in there.”
And the two of them hastened to retrieve their clothes and neaten their hair and, in Alexandra’s case, wash her face and apply fresh lipstick. The siren of rescue was heard a mile away, halfway up the beach road where the old apple orchard had blossomed and borne fruit before being turned into tract houses, and grew louder approaching the causeway, and wound its whooping bleat around the mansion before braking on the gravel below the windows. Sukie hastily gathered up the cards, the bell, the mirror, the candles, the breadboard, and the brass bowl holding the flaky ashes of the two fiery invasions of the astral plane; she carried these things all into the kitchen and slammed cabinet doors while Alexandra pushed a roaring Electrolux over the sacred ring. The Cascade pellets rattled in the extender wand and pelted in the flexible hose, windblown into a netherworld populated by dust mites.
The downstairs doorbell rasped. Sukie buzzed the visitors in. The stairs shook with a thunder of footsteps; the EMT team rushed through the open door, in their lime-green scrubs. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all younger than any of the widows’ children. The man with the most equipment attached to him said breathlessly, “We had a hard time finding this place. Nobody in town wanted to tell us.”
The woman, who carried the least equipment, wrinkled her nose, smelling the sweet candle smoke and noticing the freshly vacuumed swaths on the carpet. But the emergency lay stretched out before them; within ten minutes they took Jane away on a stretcher, still alive, they promised, but swaddled to her chin in a silver thermal blanket and hooked up to colorless drips that fed into both her wrists.
She died in the Westwick Hospital that night, or, rather, early the next morning, when the waning moon, like a wafer being dunked, was surrendering its glow to dawn’s first tea-colored tinge. Her abdominal aorta had burst and there was no repairing the rupture. Blood had swamped her insides. Doc Pat was to have read the X-rays next morning, and his son in Providence had been going to propose a preëmptive operation, which for a woman her age, with her recent history of uncertain health, carried significant hazards. No one, the medical establishment assured her two stricken friends, was at fault. As deaths go, Jane’s had been quick and easy—among friends, not painless but the pain lasting only a few seconds before her consciousness closed down.
Of these three, Jane had been the only witch to truly fly, and in death she lifted the other two out of Eastwick. After a mere month the town had re-exerted the spell that had mired the unfortunate trio decades before—the curious sense that at the town’s borders meaningful reality ceased. Their plans, discussed by phone and e-mail all spring, to use Eastwick as a springboard for improving trips elsewhere—up to Providence and its museums, down the coast to New London, over to Newport—had proved too ambitious. Beneath the seductive sun of daily habit, of meals and errands and the threefold pursuit of various threads of local interest, inertia had set in.
Now, with Jane’s death and the social arrangements it compelled, the outer world pounced, exhilarating and confusing the two survivors with its color and variety. Brookline, that seceded civic entity fastened to Commonwealth Avenue like a big tick sucking vitality from Boston’s body politic, was, between Beacon Street and Route 9, all curving streets and multi-million-dollar homes of brick and stucco set on small, earnestly green lush lawns overloaded with manicured shrubs and select trees. The Tinker house had a deeper front yard than most, and a higher, darker profile, crowned by a dormered third story with a turret as empty as a church belfry.
Sukie had already met the mistress of this mansion, but Alexandra was unprepared for the shock of magic imparted, with a gleam of mischief, by a century’s longevity. Death had apparently chosen to overlook this woman—evidence, Alexandra conjectured, remembering the trip she and Jane had taken together, that the Egyptian hope of eternally prolonged ankh had a possible practical basis. The remarkably old lady was the size of a thirteen-year-old, or a carefully packed mummy. She met them in her entrance hall, at the foot of a great wide walnut staircase that diminished upward into a gloom of darkening wallpaper. She had descended to her daughter-in-law’s funeral party by means of a cage elevator whose shaft was installed beside the staircase and rose through its turns like a staff through the snakes of Mercury’s caduceus; since its spindly frame offered no substantial obstacle to the eye, Mrs. Tinker’s descent, that of a veritable dea ex machina, was observed with wonder by the mourners gathered on the terrazzo first floor. As gently as if entrusting to Alexandra’s broad hand the delicate treasure of a stuffed extinct bird, she laid four dry fingers in the younger old woman’s palm, which was moist in the humid heat of early August in the East.
“So you’re Alexandra,” Mrs. Tinker said in a creaky, rustling, but distinctly articulated voice. “Jane adored you.” The creases in her cheeks were so deep they suggested streaks of warpaint on the face of an Indian brave; her face overall was the parched yellow-brown that cheap books turn at the edges of each page, without being directly touched by sunlight. Her lower eyelids had sagged, exposing the palest of pinks on their inner sides.
